A CDMA iPhone is reportedly being produced by new Taiwanese supplier Pegatron and will launch on the Verizon network during the holiday season. (Source: Phonedog)

In other news the iPhone's hardware chief, Mark Papermaster, has reportedly been fired. It's unclear whether his imposed exodus from Apple was in part due to antennagate or if something else was afoot. (Source: Edible Apple)

Change is in the air for the Apple iPhone

Need
proof that iPhone
exclusivity in the U.S. is about to go the way of the dodo?
Look no further than second place U.S. wireless carrier AT&T's U.S.
Securities and Exchange Commission filing which assures
investors that sales will continue strong even "as these
exclusivity arrangements end." To help remove any
ambiguity of what it might be talking about, the report goes on to
state, "We believe offering a wide variety of handsets reduces
dependence on any single handset."

Apple appears on the
verge of finally embracing multiple carriers within the U.S.,
adopting the approach that, in part, allowed Android to surge
ahead of it in the U.S. smartphone market.

But
to jump to the number one and number three carriers in the U.S.,
Verizon and Sprint, Apple must first produce a CDMA-capable
iPhone (the current iPhone works on GSM, a rival
technology).

The phone reportedly will ship in Q4 2010 -- just
in time for the holiday season. Bloomberg also
previously
reported that a CDMA iPhone is on its way, jumping to
Verizon and possibly Sprint. Another report indicates that
T-Mobile will officially
pick up the iPhone, as well, which currently is only available to
customers who jailbreak
and unlock iPhones.

A jump to the rest of America's
top carriers -- including the nation's largest carrier, Verizon --
could yield a massive surge in iPhone subscribers and big profits for
Apple and its new wireless partners alike. If Apple can get
its antenna
problems under control, that is.

Apple
insider John Gruber, who runs the blog Daring
Fireball,
first suggests that Papermaster was released for the iPhone 4 antenna
debacle, writing:

From
what I’ve heard, it’s clear he was sacked. Papermaster was a
conspicuous absence at the Antennagate press conference. Inside
Apple, he’s “the guy responsible for the antenna” — that’s
a quote from a source back on July 23.

Does
Apple have a “make one mistake and you’re fired” policy? No.
But, if the mistake is big enough, sometimes yes. But I don’t even
know whether the iPhone 4 antenna is the only thing that led to
Papermaster’s sacking....It’s Mansfield, not Papermaster, who
appears in Apple’s
six-minute iPhone 4 promotional video — and that video was
shot weeks (months?) before the iPhone 4 was unveiled....But
maybe Papermaster was already on the outs, and Mansfield was already
overseeing the engineering of things like the Retina Display and the
A4....One last tidbit from an informed source: the bug on the
“touching it wrong” signal loss issue was filed two years ago.
This is not a problem they didn’t catch, or caught too late. So, on
the one hand, clearly the fundamental antenna design predated
Papermaster’s time at the company. But on the other hand, there was
plenty of time to find a solution to the problem. I.e., it’s not
that Apple should not have used an external antenna. It’s that it
should have been even better.

Of
numerous Apple-centric writers, Gruber has some of the best inside
access to Apple, so if he doesn't know exactly why Papermaster is
sacked, it's clear that just about no one does. One thing's
clear, though -- the iPad/iPhone/iPod hardware team is moving on and
Papermaster isn't part of that process.

Comments

Threshold

Username

Password

remember me

This article is over a month old, voting and posting comments is disabled